Ben Shewry is the award-winning chef and owner of renowned restaurant Attica, where his innovative, boundary-pushing cuisine has earned him global acclaim. Known for his deep connection to sustainable and native ingredients and a commitment to excellence, Ben's culinary vision goes beyond the plate. His book, Uses for Obsession offers a vulnerable, humorous, and hard-hitting exploration of his journey, as well as his thoughts on what it takes to thrive in the hospitality industry, our responsibility in terms of sustainability and he has quite a bit to say about food writers. Ben inspires both within and beyond the kitchen, making him a truly influential figure in the world of modern gastronomy, as well as a wise man in life and Uses for Obsession is an important read whether you're a chef, a food writer or a human. I had, of course long wanted to chat to Ben and I was delighted to have the opportunity. It was everything I had hoped for and more.
Conversation with a chef: First of all, congratulations, it's such a huge thing. And I saw that you did the audio book recording as well. I love a good audio book, and I'm really intrigued by that process as well.
Ben Shewry: It's challenging narrating a book. I've got friends who have done it, and some of those friends have been broadcasters, and they said that that was one of the hardest things that they ever did. And so I was like, oh. But I loved it. It was kind of like acting. There's no acting in the words that I wrote, but you've got to bring such energy to all the different chapters. It was draining. It was six hours a day for six days. You make so many mistakes. You have to stop all the time. It is hard to get through. The most that I would've successfully read without a mistake was that paragraph. You're in a booth and you're with a producer who's on the other side of the glass and they say, stop, read. No, you can do better than that. Read it again.
It would be interesting too, rereading it, because you've already done all of editing and rewriting, was it hard not to change it as you went?
I'm happy with it because theres been a lot of investment in the book. Murdoch saw its potential from the beginning. I met with several publishers, and I took meetings, and Murdoch was the one that I felt were willing to publish whatever I wrote. Even when I didn't really know what I was going to write, they took a risk on me. I should say it's Murdoch Books, not Murdoch Media, not Rupert Murdoch. Its a different company. They've showed me a lot of faith, and they offered me a lot of support as well, because I'm a full-time chef. I'm more than a full-time chef. I'm still working 60-70 hours a week and running this restaurant. And to add on top of that, the writing of a book. I am absolutely particular about words, I love writing. It's been the greatest passion of my life, really. And it was one of the only things in high school, which I was told I was any good at. And so I've always carried that message from that one great teacher. They've been very supportive. But by the time I got to the audiobook, the manuscript was complete. I wrote the manuscript, I ordered it, I had three readers on it. I would say, they were some of the smartest people around. My sister, who's English literature professor at University of Santa Barbara, in California. Erik Jensen, who's the Editor in Chief of the Saturday Paper. And Kylie. My development editor, Jaclyn Crupi, herself, a published author and editor. I would write and they would give me feedback and they would make changes. There were rounds and rounds and rounds of that across the two years. And then I handed the manuscript over to the publisher, and the structural editor edited it, and we argued. And he did a really great job, Justin. And then it went to the highline editor in London, Alison, she did a magnificent job. We didn't argue as much. And then it went through two rounds of proofreads. And at this stage, after every round of edits, I'm re-reading the whole manuscript. So, by the time it was sent to the printers it was about the same time as I narrated the audio book. I see mistakes in books pretty frequently, but I think that generally the level of investment that I just outlined, which was essentially three rounds of edits, plus my own personal team of readers editing everything as well, that level of care and investment in a book is rare. I'll pick up a book and see spelling mistakes instantly. And they told me that when you're reading your audiobook, youll see five mistakes. I found one mistake in a recipe, in a conversion from centimetres to inches, not something that impacts anybody. It was the size of a lasagna pan. It wasn't a mistake that I'd made, I should add too, with somebody that was converting it.
There's two parts to this question, I recently spoke to Annie Smithers.
Oh, she's tremendous.
She has just put out her latest book as well. And it's interesting that you say that you've always loved writing, and that was a strength that school, because it is for her as well.
It doesn't surprise me.
She's really articulate, as you are. She started her book with the question, Why Cook? And then we talked about also, Why write? You've really produced something that's by all accounts, really vulnerable, and quite hard hitting in some areas. I really loved thatMatty Matheson has read it, and he said that it was "powerful, vulnerable, intense, full of love and some darkness." But why write and why cook?
For me, writing and cooking are the same. And if you think about cooking and you think about recipes, recipes are the most direct and honest form of writing that exists in the world. I've been writing recipes, my recipes, almost my entire life. We can tend to think of recipes as these simple things that aren't very valuable in terms of the writing canon. But in fact, it's very difficult to be as direct and honest as a recipe in your general writing.It's something I've tried to apply to the writing of this book. So, why write? For me the things that I've said in the book, the only safe place to say them is a book. It's no longer online. And it was never really online. You can't say these things on Instagram. It's too flammable. People get too offended.
You can't say them really in an interview in a major newspaper because it's too brief. Or it could get taken out of context. And you cant really control that. Podcasts are probably one of the other ways, but they're brief. Nobody really wants to listen to us talk for 10 hours to really unpack what I'm thinking. Documentaries are too brief and don't really tell enough of the story. And also are more about the directive of the producer anddirector.
They can be so nuanced as well.
I never saw a documentary that was good that the person who was the subject of it made either. Even though we think of books as antiquated, they're really not, because they are really the last place, and maybe they were always the only place for you really to project your thoughts and experiences and dreams and hopes for the world.
That's certainly what this is. Words have been thrown around like "manifesto".
It's funny. I think that's a word that other people are going to assign to it. It's certainly not me.
But also optimism.
It is optimistic. I think as humans, because I've gone to places that really haven't been gone to before by a chef in a memoir. There's a tendency to focus on negative stuff. This book is about so much more than dark tales, even though there are plenty. I tried to make this book as humorous and as silly and efferent as possible. There's a chapter that's 10,000 words on lasagna and Bolognese, and it's completely mad. It's the first piece of writing I did; it was the test chapter. It's rambling. And I think it's funny. I dont know if an author should say that their writing is funny. But I try to make it funny.
And it certainly has got that reaction with people. I think the ability to make people laugh in a book where you're delivering some hard truths is a powerful thing.
Also it's about this silly crazy life that I grew up in, in the back country of New Zealand and a family making lasagna and Bolognese with no connection to Italy, never been to Italy, didn't know a single other Italian dish, and yet here we are in the 1970s making this exotic sounding dish called lasagna. How does that become a part of our culture? It really leads me to my understanding of how culture is never standing still. It's always evolving. But sometimes we look upon culture in a romantic sense as if it's set in stone and doesn't change. But could you imagine Thai cooking without chilies? I certainly couldn't. But that was a relatively recent introduction from the Portuguese. Could you imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes? Well, that's not an Italian fruit, it was brought to Italy by the Aztecs. So these are facts, but yet they are also synonymous with both those cultures and cuisines. What I'm saying is that it doesn't stand still. All cuisine was once new, all cooking was once new. These classic dishes were once revolutionary. Culture evolves and people adapt things for better or worse, including my family.
For me, writing and cooking are the same. And if you think about cooking and you think about recipes, recipes are the most direct and honest form of writing that exists in the world. I’ve been writing recipes, my recipes, almost my entire life. We can tend to think of recipes as these simple things that aren’t very valuable in terms of the writing canon. But in fact, it’s very difficult to be as direct and honest as a recipe in your general writing.It’s something I’ve tried to apply to the writing of this book. ~ Ben Shewry, Attica
How did you settle on the ideas you wanted to explore in the book? Are you a diary keeper, had you written notes before?
No, I don't care about record keeping or legacy whatsoever. I'm quite strange for the, let's call us high-end chefs of the world, or chefs that have had famous restaurants or have been in silly lists like the World 50 best. We are traditionally great keepers of our own legacies because it's filled with ego and hubris, and we like to document everything as if some other species of humans in a hundred years or 200 years might care what we did. Nobody's going to care when we die. We are so odd as humans, but to me it's a funny thing to be documenting your work all the time. What I really like is to be very forward focused, so I don't document intentionally. I really can't go back to where I came from with cooking. I'm always looking forward. I always want to evolve that. I always want to bring something new. Thats how we have stayed relevant to our customers as well. Because you keep people guessing and you keep coming up with new things and you don't just go back to the things that you've already done and settle on that. It's definitely a harder way to work.
Is that what you mean by great cooking is an intellectual act?
No, what I mean by great cooking is an intellectual act is, I mean that that cooking is totally under intellectualised. That somebody who is an amazing cook can be on the level with their intelligence in different ways than a scholar or somebody who's really, really famous in society for doing something. A tremendous cook has a level of intelligence that's not necessarily conversational, but is deep and inherent within them. Their gifts and the pleasure that they can create are absolutely inextricably linked to them. And, and so what I'm saying is we don't appreciate cooking in the way that we should. It's not on the same level as other things that are more celebrated in society, or we think that it's just kind of a physical dumb occupation where it takes a hell of a lot of intelligence to make a great cook. Like Annie Smithers is a great example. That's incredibly intelligent cooking.
She says, "I just cook lunch."
Because she's the most humble person you'll ever meet. And she's not going to take that from me. She doesn't want to hear me saying that I think she's tremendously intelligent. She is a tremendously intelligent person. When I eat that food, I see her deep intelligence, in a way that I don't see in other people's cooking. But the point I'm making is that society will celebrate things in certain ways and put things up on pedestals. We put doctors and lawyers up on pedestals. But all I'm saying is that cooking at a really high level requires the same, if not more level of intelligence as excelling at anything at a high level.
I absolutely agree. Obviously I'm in awe of chefs. I've got a podcast called Conversation with a chef because I love hearing chef stories. I can never get my head around the repertoire that chefs have for palate and flavour and technique and doing everything at volume, or at all different times over the course of a night. I think you mentioned that chefs are great problem solvers, and chefs around our age and the generation maybe below will say things like, I wasn't very good at school, so I got pushed into hospitality or into being a chef. I can never understand that because I couldn't do what you do.
That's a part of a lot of chef stories. I would try to reframe that comment as I wasn't good at school into this system of school did not fit certain people well. I was a very average to poor student, and I don't blame the school that I was in at all. I went to a public school in New Zealand, but my mother, who is a school teacher and was a very high-level principal and eventually, and a resource teacher of English literature, said that the schooling system failed me. Not teachers, but the system. And so I've come to see it more as a failure of the system than a failure or an indictment on my worth as an individual. But it was certainly hard not to see it the other way when I was 16, 17 and failing. But I was lucky because I always had this knowledge that I was going to be a chef from the age of five and everything in my life was aimed in that direction. Everything I did helped achieve that goal, and that meant what I would do after school: I'd practise cooking, what I would do on school holidays: I would go and work with a professional cake decorator. We would go to the Mokau Marae and experience culture, or I would do a hangi with my cousins. Everything was about relentlessly attaining that dream of becoming a chef. But I didn't think of it like that at the time. It didn't matter to me that I failed school. I have carried parts of failing school, not finishing school. But coming back to kind of this concept of great cooking being something that's highly intelligent. The reason why it's an important point to me is because we under intellectualise what we do ourselves. And in some instances, and in many cases, this holds us back within the service economy. If we want to make this a profession that's attractive and lucrative, then we need to step up in that regard and say, actually, you know what? What I do is on the level of any other profession. Society might not recognize that. But I've done some thinking about it and I've done some comparison and some analysis and that's the conclusion that I've come to because I'm completely committed to this. I've dedicated my life to it. Here's the skill that I have, and this is the time that I've put in. This is the money that I've invested into it, and this is the education that I have and this is the level that I think I cook at. And that is an intelligent level. It's really simple.
It’s sheer folly to ignore the ground that you stand on. I really learned pretty early on in my life that the best cooking that I could do was the cooking of the country where I was, not the cooking of some faraway place. As much as I could, I would want to respect the culture of where I come from or where I live and be interested in it and passionate about it and help to share that with people. In Australia, the culture of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people, it really is the most intrinsically magnificent thing that we have here, and yet we don’t value it in the way that we should. It’s that world’s oldest living cooking, what a remarkable thing. ~ Ben Shewry, Attica
Talking about being forward thinking and thinking about moving away from this idea of, we did it hard as chefs, so toughen up, there's a lot more compassion in a different kind of model that you're proposing. How easy is that to do?
It's not easy. But it's worthwhile. Anything easy is not worth doing. And anything hard is definitely worth doing. It's a gradual shift in our whole industry. This business changed years and years ago. The way that we have run Attica in the last decade is based on a sense of fairness and understanding that we need to put our people first always, because they are the company, they are the business and without them and without their wellbeing and their happiness, we have nothing. Also making the connection between having work-life balance, a fair wage and performance. This is really where we've shot out ourselves in the foot because the exploitation of hospitality workers, overworking them, underpaying them, treating them poorly, not standing up for the rights of women, which has been a really long-term problem in our industry. All these things make us low performance. Take away the hardship to the individual. Which, if you're looking at this as an industry problem, you should be able to, just on that selfish level, if you treat people like shit, if they work too many hours a week, if you abuse them, underpay them, if you have a sexist, racist, racist, misogynistic workplace, that's going to be a really poor performing culture. So you should try to stamp that stuff out as much as you can in a workplace, because it's your moral obligation as an employer and a leader, of course. But also secondary to that is the performance. You're not going to perform at elite level, with those old ideas and those tropes. That's not the future. That's the simplest way I could put it. Not everybody cares about these things, I suppose, so I would always kind of come back to the idea that you might not think that it's important to have a gender balance in a kitchen, but I'm telling you, if you don't, your business will underperform. It performs better when there's 50 50 balance. It's just a fact and I know this from having an imbalance. And you might not care if your chefs are well rested until you see them having proper days off and being able to connect with their family and their friends, and really act like normal people in society, then you would be able to actually see their potential. It is idiotic to think any differently. Even if you just put it into the lens of performance, not about kindness, but just performance.
You make a statement: empathy is the older sibling of performance. Is that what you're talking about?
Yes, exactly. And it's just to say that all things are connected so clearly. The better you treat people, the better your business would perform. And you know, I have a really great shining example of a company that I look up to: Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company. They're also a big corporation like Attica, which gains certification this year. They're a really great example. We have some friends in the company, and they have helped us a little bit. Its just an inspirational company to look up to. We are a tiny ant compared to Patagonia. But that company sort of has a different view of capitalism, of how business can behave, cares about more than just their own needs, has a real long term view, cares about the rights of their staff, has a holistic approach to sustainability, advocates for a better future. I think they are all things that we should do in business. They shouldn't even be exceptional. Right? Patagonia is held up as an exceptional example and for good reason. But what I would say is that really these things should be normalised.
Well, absolutely. That's right. And I think from someone who grew up in the North Island and being surrounded as were by so much nature, but also as you say, there was the marae down the road and so on. I really like that you talk about how important it is to recognise the food and the cooking practices of the country that you're on. And you certainly have done that here as well in the foraging and the appreciation of native ingredients for one. But I think spending time with Murrundindi and walking on country and embracing that, is that part of a holistic approach to sustainability?
It's sheer folly to ignore the ground that you stand on. I really learned pretty early on in my life that the best cooking that I could do was the cooking of the country where I was, not the cooking of some faraway place. As much as I could, I would want to respect the culture of where I come from or where I live and be interested in it and passionate about it and help to share that with people. In Australia, the culture of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people, it really is the most intrinsically magnificent thing that we have here, and yet we don't value it in the way that we should. It's that world's oldest living cooking, what a remarkable thing. The use of the food of Australia, of the more than 8,000 endemic ingredients and the histories of hundreds of countries and languages, when you start to spend time on country, as we have for more than a decade, you start to learn about how small your place in all of this is. And it's humbling in that way. I love that. There have been times in my career where I've felt like I've invented something and then I've been on country in a part of Australia with an aboriginal elder, and they've told me a story about how their people were making something similar. And I might have been really excited about my discovery and yet I've learned that it's probably tens of thousands of years old. And there's such a deep beauty and a sense of place within that. It's really important for Australians to embrace First Nations culture and to learn about it because it has made me feel more at home here knowing a little bit of it. I think the generosity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples knows no bounds, the kindness after everything that's been said and done, it's humbling. It's hard for me to have a bad day when I reflect upon what my friends have been through. Murrundindi is the perfect example of the way he holds himself in the world. For those of you who are listening who don't know who Murrundindiis, hes the Ngurungaeta, or head man of the Wurundjeri people. And he's an incredible mentor and a friend, and he's so endlessly generous with the people that he meets and has such depth and a beauty in that it's absolutely remarkable and terribly inspiring. I think it's hard not to want to be a better person when you're around somebody like that.
Absolutely. I read on Instagram what you wrote 19 tenets for Melbourne Food and Wine about the things that you've learned from 19 years of Attica. They were just so beautiful and really wise things, not just about hospitality, but things for anyone else in life. But I just wanted to ask about, don't fuck the planet with reckless cooking. What's reckless cooking for you?
Reckless cooking is blindly cooking with foods you don't have any understanding of their place in the country. There are many foods that we use that are commonplace, that are incredibly unsustainable. Tasmanian salmon being right up the top of them, bluefin tuna being another one, the caviar from the beluga sturgeon being another absolutely deplorable ingredient, foie gras the fattened goose, or duck liver being another thing that's super disturbing. And these are just the well-known ones. There's many, many ingredients that are still commonplace on restaurant menus that both customers and chefs should refuse to serve. This practice of using these foods will lead to the extinction of these animals. And that's not hyperbole, that's a fact. The beluga sturgeon is already extinct in many parts of the Adriatic Sea. It's not even a conversation at this point. There's so much scientific evidence to back what I'm saying, written by way more intelligent people than me. Yet we are still dependent on these foods. We feel like we need them, we need to have them on our menus. We need to eat them as customers. I really just think we need a reality check because we are in the grips of a climate crisis, and the loss of biodiversity that's happening in the world, and the destruction of our ecosystems through poor farming, this is something we're passing on to all the generations coming up under us. And we just have to clean our houses. We have to actually do a stocktake of the foods that we cook and the foods that we eat, and have an honest question with ourselves about whether or not we really need to serve these things. I can tell you, there are a lot of alternatives. Attica would seek not to serve a single one of them. And the way that we do that is by keeping ourselves informed and educating ourselves and talking to people, and reading books and talking to fishermen, and taking the advice of scientists and working with people like the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and their guide and Good Fish. It's so easy in a lot of these instances not to eat these foods. And yet we bury our heads in the sand. In the book and on that 19 years of Attica, I'm really calling out that kind of behaviour because it's not about me at all, it's about our planet, and it's about having a sense of holistic sustainability. It's about the needs of the community and society and of the globe being more than your own immediate needs and the things that you think that you need to have on a menu so that you have the profit margins wherever you need to have them.It's just lame and it's so boring as well. I don't want to eat these things. Use something I haven't heard of.
Well, I was surprised to read in a New Zealand magazine that I still subscribe to that, that scallops have been farmed out, they've been overused. There aren't any scallops in New Zealand. And then the suggestion was, but you could still do these recipes with scallops from Australia. I thought is that the attitude? Oh, we don't have any here, let's get them from elsewhere. Not maybe learning the lesson that we don't have any here, that we've overfished them.
That's likeAustralia selling its rubbish to Southeast Asia. It's just deplorable leadership. The real thing is that we can't eat scallops. That's the reality. Unless they came from a sustainable source. And that would only be from somebody who was diving for them one at a time in an environment where the numbers that they were diving for them and they were picking them by hand. I mean hand diving, which is dangerous and hard work where that was done in an environment where nature could replenish itself. But dredging, which is the method for catching scallops, is like dragging a set of harrows that rake the soil to smooth out in farmer's paddocks, like dragging a set of harrows across the bottom of the ocean. So that is just no good. So, no scallops. And also to your point, destroying somebody else's ecosystem, because we want to eat something ridiculous. Eat something else. There are other things we can eat.
Yes. Now what I did love is that you talked about real hospitality not being broken. Although, as you mentioned before, there are aspects that are not great still within hospitality. How do you balance those two?
Oh, they're different things. My argument that real hospitality is not broken, is not about the problems in hospitality, not about, like I said, the abuse of drugs and alcohol, or sexual harassment or racism, that's not what I'm talking about. When I say real hospitality is not broken, what I mean by that is more in the business sense. This is a difficult financial year for restaurants globally, but there have been many difficult years in restaurants. It's a difficult business to survive in and to thrive in. But what I'm saying is when we start a business, we accept that, are we blind to not know this? Of course we know this. There's a high level of personal responsibility that needs to be applied to owning a restaurant. What I've heard is whinging, oh, this is so hard. What I've also heard is a lot of people exiting the building saying, oh, I don't want to do this anymore. Throwing hands up and saying, I can't do this because hospitality is broken, that's so irresponsible and reckless and so disrespectful to the millions of us that still choose to do this every day. And so disrespectful to the young employees who have to hear that message just because you couldn't make it work or you weren't prepared to make it work. Pathetic. That's what I mean by real hospitality is not broken. Give me some solutions to move forward in business. Don't throw your hands up and say it's all broken. No, your business model, your particular business model is broken. Not hospitality is broken. It's a wonderful occupation and a wonderful industry that plays a vital and important service to society, and it can be a successful business.
We have to actually do a stocktake of the foods that we cook and the foods that we eat, and have an honest question with ourselves about whether or not we really need to serve these things. I can tell you, there are a lot of alternatives. Attica would seek not to serve a single one of them. And the way that we do that is by keeping ourselves informed and educating ourselves and talking to people, and reading books and talking to fishermen, and taking the advice of scientists and working with people like the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and their guide and Good Fish. It’s so easy in a lot of these instances not to eat these foods. And yet we bury our heads in the sand. In the book, I’m really calling out that kind of behaviour because it’s not about me at all, it’s about our planet, and it’s about having a sense of holistic sustainability. It’s about the needs of the community and society and of the globe being more than your own immediate needs and the things that you think that you need to have on a menu. ~ Ben Shewry, Attica
And to your 19th point, never give up.
That's right. We went through the GFC, we went through near bankruptcy. You didn't hear me at that time saying, oh my God, it's everybody else's fault. The system is broken. No. What you would have heard from me at that time is, what are we going to do to try to get out of this?
And over lockdown. All of those incredible things you did, and just the joy it brought people.
Well, I was also thinking of my employees at that time, first and foremost, and the community. I'm not a perfect person. I'm not saying it's not hard, but what I'm saying is, if you're in business, you've chosen to be in business, you didn't just fall into business, please just take responsibility for your business, as imperfect, or as perfect as it might be. This is not a perfect business. I'm not a perfect person. I'm not coming at it from that angle. I'm saying that we've pretty much been the worst of the worst. And we were able to turn things around. So any anybody can
And partners in this rhetoric of the broken industry are food writers.
Yes.
Talk to me about that.
Sometimes they are just echo chambers as well. There's not really any thought going into these articles often and they'll gather up the most negative bunch of naysayers and publish all of their talking points and that will lead to a full bodied rant. But their role is maybe to look a little deeper and to actually research things and to talk to some people who aren't going out of business to give another perspective. If somebody's going out of business and they want to complain about why they can't make it anymore, well, maybe you should go around the corner to the cafe that's actually thriving and ask them why they're thriving as well because that could actually be a lot more helpful to people reading an article and to anybody interested in coming to the business.
Talk to me too about this point, because it doesn't sit well with me anymore. The kind of top-down food critic model. I'm not sure if that's what you mean when you say, food critics are not better judges of food than the average person? That's probably a different question. I don't like seeing restaurants really pulled apart. I think about the chefs that I speak to, and a couple of them I had spoken to and then the restaurant was quite savagely pulled apart, and I feel for the person. And then I've made statements like, what other industry gets their performance review published in the paper? And people have said to me, well, they do because movies get rated. Am I being too sensitive towards the chefs that I like to champion?
That's not even a fair comparison for somebody to say to you that movies are reviewed the same as a restaurant. For a start, a restaurant is almost always a small business. If Columbia Pictures get a bad review, maybe it hurts the feelings of the director and the crew, but it's really not the same thing at all. We're talking about the occupations and livelihoods of people in the service economy. People who aren't highly paid. A director's probably getting millions and millions from that so he can console himself in the fact that he's financially secure. But a restaurant that gets a bad review, its future is under threat. And not only it's financial future, but also the mental health and the wellbeing of its team who read that and feel bad about themselves when quite often, maybe not always, but quite often, that review could just be completely misinformed. It might not even be written by a real expert. In the book, I make an argument that I've been cooking continuously professionally from the age of 10 to 14. That's when I first went into a kitchen. I'm 47, how many years is that? It's at least 30. They are my credentials. I've been continuously cooking professionally and honing my craft for 30 years. And I'm completely and utterly dedicated and serious about it. If you want to review me and judge the results of my cooking, then you need to be at the same level as me, because otherwise I would ask, how are you qualified to criticise me? It's really simple, this has just been a one-way street for my entire career and we are under this constant pressure of being reviewed by a variety of different publications multiple times a year, year on year for eternity. All of us in the industry, we live with the stress in the restaurant industry. We live with the stress of not knowing if we're going to do well in the guide or not knowing if we're going to do well in a review, will we go up, will we go down? How will that affect our business? How will that affect the morale of our team? And sadly, this pressure is not coming from other small businesses. It's coming from huge media organisations that write these reviews and make money off our backs.
Is there another way? In an ideal world, how could we work together?
Well, in the ideal world, instead of it taking one sideways shift for a journalist to go from working as a general reporter to becoming a food critic with literally no experience, it would take that level of commitment from them to their craft. And not only to writing, because writing is only a very small part of reviewing. Palate is everything for a food critic as it is for a chef. And, and I'm not saying this is all food critics, because there have been some great examples. I write extensively about the late great Jonathan Gold from the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, who's the greatest to ever to do it. He is the example that I would give to somebody who is an aspiring food writer, that you have to go deep, but also you have to have some life experience and come at it from different ways. But you also need to understand that your reviews have to be fact-based, it cant just be your feelings on it. The facts are the most interesting things. Who's behind the restaurant? Where have they come from? Who grows the food? How was it made? What was the inspiration? There's so much that goes into restaurants making them what they are. And yet I read so many reviews that really look like they're just describing how a vacuum cleaner works, completely boring and benign with no real factual information for the reader. And surely that's the goal, to inform the reader. I just make the argument that food critics dont know any better than the average person because they kind of are the average person in a lot of cases. It's really simple. Whereas we and our hospitality industry are absolutely fucking dedicated to it.
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